Making Sense of Gartner’s Hype Cycle — Partner Perspective
Gartner analyzed the enterprise use and deployment of more than 2000 technologies, and identified eight technologies to the Hype Cycle this year. They include:
- 5G, Artificial General Intelligence, Deep Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Digital Twin, Edge Computing, Serverless PaaS & Cognitive Computing.
This is exciting for vendors…and channel partners, but can also be a huge challenge. Partners view the emergence of technologies as a catalyst to augment their current business model, while simultaneously satisfying their customer’s needs. And they need to do it profitably. It’s a definite puzzle.
Gartner is aware of the hype surrounding emerging technologies — specifically the hype around technologies that they highlight. To help make sense of it all, Gartner represents their hype cycles in a fairly basic chart. To understand exactly where Gartner is coming from with their definitions of a “hype cycle,” let’s look at this year’s emerging technologies, and how they are represented on this graph.
The Y-axis represents expectation and the X-axis represents time and is further separated into different categories:
- Innovation Trigger — The technology has a beginning breakthrough with potential.
- Peak of Inflated Expectations — Media gets hold of it, starts covering the topic and highlighting success stories, but with an eye on failures as well.
- Trough of Disillusionment — As the technology is adopted, users recognize gaps, and the technology fails to deliver. Producers and developers being to tail off.
- Slope of Enlightenment — Over time, loyal adopters of the tech begin to see results and new developments. True “enterprise benefit” becomes more understood — adoption becomes pronounced.
- Plateau of Productivity — Mainstream adoption begins to rise, and the reality of the technology is being recognized.
The Hype Cycle simply represents the potential of emerging technologies, and how relevant they might be to solving business issues that exist in companies today.
Leveraging Gartner’s Hype Cycle
Here is an example: Read any of the media feeds, and you see that analysts are expecting accelerated growth in AI. According to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide , the market will grow this year by more than 59 percent over 2016 to $12.5 billion, reaching $46 billion by 2020. This is primarily being driving by CPUs and GPUs that can better handle parallel workloads, the emergence of deep learning techniques, a proliferation of practical use cases around data analytics, and the desire to make sense of the massive data exhaust being generated.
This ties in nicely with the opportunities and Hype Cycle around IoT, which is a huge market in its own right. In fact, the Boston Consulting Group market analysis, Winning In IoT, It’s All About The Business Processes, predicts that by 2020, $267B will be spent on IoT technologies, products, and services. The greatest two sources of revenue growth in the IoT market will be from services and IoT applications investment. Great news for the consulting partner community — especially those focused on analytics.
Unfortunately, it is not enough for the partner community to simply understand the opportunity, from reselling AI and IoT platforms, or bringing customers to AI and IoT platforms in public clouds. The key will be for partners to learn which technologies and vendors can best be applied to address their customer needs, and to be obsessed about customer outcomes first. This requires an investment on the part of the partner community, as well as deep relationships with the vendor, especially in the beginning of the cycle, where knowledge transfer from vendor to channel occurs on a customer-by-customer basis during initial early adoption projects. This is important to enable scale.
Partner-centric vendors understand that knowledge transfer to the client should primarily flow through the channel that sells the offerings/solutions. Partners should be working to understand their unique customer business needs and engaging with customers to make it clear that their Superpower can best support their needs. Why is this important? Because there is often a belief that customers should go directly to the vendors — I mean…who better to understand their own solutions than the vendor, right? Well…that would be wrong, especially over time.
A strong partner community is essentially to the success of a technology being adopted. No technology vendor or platform provider can understand the nuances of all customers, in all industries. There is a need for partners that have “superpowers” that add to the overall value proposition to the customer. Additionally, according to Gartner’s 2017 survey of 83 IT and business leaders, more than half of respondents said that a top challenge to adopting emerging technologies was the lack of staff skills, which opens up opportunities for the channel.
Articulating Your Superpower
Any partner looking to build a business off of a vendor solution should keep in mind that the vendor sellers like things to be simple. Over-rotate on a message that is concise, memorable, and can spark a call to action. When building a message around your superpower, consider the following:
- Share a customer story
- Share a current win and top target logos
- Share your competency — and a 2 minute “why you”
- Summarize a call to action.
Find a way to easily deliver this is less than 5 minutes. The goal is to quickly gain attention, not to confuse them with too many details. Pique their interest, and let them ask to drill deeper. The goal for the partner is to explain to Vendor Sellers how engaging with them will help their customers adopt these technologies more quickly.
- Help them identify customer outcomes that matter
- Identify likely challenges
- Identify customer success criteria early
- Highlight the partner value in the solution — something highly differentiated (Superpower)
- Establish a first step for the seller
Sounds simple, but it isn’t. It is, however, well worth the investment of time and energy to do this, especially if you get it right.
Shift your view.
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